How old is obamas speechwriter

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Litt landed an internship in D. Without knowing that such a thing existed, I ended up at a White House entry level speech writing job. David Litt "I was 24 and he was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and it was just a short stop at the airport, so for people who have been writing speeches for a long time this was not a big deal. David Litt with President Obama. Jon Favreau is a political speechwriter. After his departure from the White House, he created his own company, Fenway Strategies. He was born at June 2 nd , in Winchester, Massachusetts.

His mother Lilian is of Greek descent. I have been fortunate, though, to work for someone who views it as a craft; as a way to organise his thoughts into a coherent argument and present them to the world. He takes it seriously. He was anonymous when he walked into that Boston hall in , and a political rock star when he walked out. That is what a speech can do.

To this day, by the way, he reminds me that he wrote that one by himself. All the time. Harder because I will stay up all night to get him a draft he will be happy with. Easier because if I do not hit the mark, he is there to back me up. And when it came to any speech of consequence, President Obama was actively involved in the product. We would often begin the process for big speeches by sitting down with him in the Oval Office.

He would walk us through what was on his mind, what he wanted to say, and we would type as fast as possible. Once we got his download, we would get to work, and get him a draft. He would often work on it himself until well past midnight. And this may sound counter-intuitive, but it was always a good thing to hear that he had a lot of edits. It did not mean he disliked what we put down. It meant we gave him what he needed to do the job. When I was drafting the Charleston eulogy, for example — the speech in which he sang Amazing Grace — I stayed up for three days straight trying to make it perfect.

I handed the draft to him the afternoon before the speech and went home to sleep. He told me he liked the first two pages. But he had rewritten the next two pages in just a few hours.

It was annoying. Still, I apologised for what I saw as letting him down. You gave me what I needed. The muse hit. And when you have been thinking about this stuff for 40 years, you will know what you want to say, too. Jon was good at building the big case and laying out the big argument. That was not my strength. I wanted to build moral and emotional cases. I wanted to make people feel something. A sense of connection. A sense of belonging. A sense of being heard.

In , a group of mostly black Americans set out to march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery to demand their right to vote. They barely made it across the town bridge before their non-violent protest was met with violent resistance. The images shocked the conscience of the country and pushed President Johnson to call for a Voting Rights Act.

The idea that just 50 years later, a black president would return to commemorate what they did was extraordinary enough. We could have gone with a safe, simple speech commemorating the anniversary. People would have understood the symbolism. It would have been enough. Free advice. I was pissed about it. Writing to be read and writing to be heard are two very different skills.

With that in mind, you should edit out loud. There were hundreds of occasions when Mrs. Obama gave me feedback that ultimately influenced how I write. Is the structure logical? Is this language the most vivid and moving that it can be? Then, when they give a speech, they often take on an overly formal and stiff giving-a-speech voice or they slip into their professional jargon and use words that no one understands.